One of the most obvious elements of Spicer's poetry is its frequent and at times near obsessive recourse to myth and legend. Here, Orpheus is the outstanding figure by some distance, but references to Greek mythology and Ovidian tales are found in many places, as well as Arthurian romance and popular mythology and Americana, as in his major books The Holy Grail and Billy the Kid. Two other more recently published late books, Helen: A Revision and to a lesser extent, Golem, underscore this aspect of Spicer's practice, which has far-reaching implications for his poetics as a whole, but also for his positioning among his peers and predecessors. In many ways, the air of familiarity but also of belatedness, unoriginality, and incompletion which Spicer's allusions foster is at the heart of his entire project, encapsulated in the concept of “tradition” as elaborated in After Lorca: “generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation – but, of course, never really losing anything” (CP, 110–11). But such a justification notwithstanding, it needs to be stressed that the plethora of learned allusion and very largely Eurocentric high classicism sets Spicer apart from many contemporaries – such as Creeley, O'Hara, and Ginsberg, or going farther afield, John Berryman – whom he otherwise resembles in his preference for a relaxed colloquial American idiom and a decidedly contemporary set of authorial postures, references, and situations.